Newly restored vinyl record helps children of World War II veteran hear their father again

He said, 'Well, you know what, war is hell. And there’s no reason you have to get involved in that.'

In 1942, Oscar Spaly left his wife and newborn child behind to fight on the battlefields of Europe in World War II.

After three years, he came home to Michigan, went to school on the GI Bill and later built a successful real estate sales and management company in Ann Arbor. But, though he suffered from what would now be called post-tramautic stress disorder, Spaly kept silent about the horrors of war for most of his life.

“He was so traumatized during his experiences in the war that it wasn’t until he was in his late 70s or early 80s that he even began to talk about it,” Spaly’s older son, Robert, said.

Spaly died six years ago at the age of 88, but his children were recently able to hear their father again as he had sounded shortly after arriving at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, before he was shipped off to Europe.

“We all had grabbed boxes from the house, and I found this record near one of the VHS tapes I was having restored,” Oscar’s younger son Doug said, sitting in his office on Packard Street in Ann Arbor.

“I remember it from when we were kids, playing it on the record machine. It’s probably why it’s in such bad condition. We probably wore it out.”

Doug — who now runs his father's company, The Spaly Group — took the vinyl record to Rob Hoffman, owner of Priceless Photo Preservation in downtown Ann Arbor.

“I was a little concerned at first because it’s very visibly scratched and damaged,” Hoffman said.

“I thought I’d be lucky if I got anything out of it. But this is what we do. We played it on the turntable and ran it through our computer and processed it and, miracle of miracles, on the first try you actually heard a voice.”

The record was pressed by Pepsi Co., which went around to bases with a mobile recording studio as part of its marketing campaign during the war. The recording opens with a greeting from Pepsi to “Mrs. Spaly” and then continues with a message from Oscar.

“When I first heard it again, I was like ‘it doesn’t even sound like my dad,’” Doug said.

“But we learned that they would get these guys at the end of the day, they’re worn out and they wait for an hour and then they’re like you have one minute to cut a record, no retakes, go.”

Hoffman said that through his research he found out that the soldiers were often handed scripts to make the recording go more smoothly, causing them to sometimes sound a bit anmatronic and less like themselves.

Spaly almost never made it into the Army. He wasn’t able to enlist when he tried to sign up in 1939.

“He had come to the country when he was 2 from Czechoslovakia and he wasn’t a citizen yet, so they turned him away,” Robert Spaly said. “They told him to just wait and eventually he’d be drafted, and sure enough, three years later he was in.”

He served for three years, making his way to Europe shortly after D-Day and fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, where he was missing in action for three weeks after his platoon found itself across the Rhine River with no support.

In 1945, Spaly came home to his wife and son, who had been born three years earlier while he was in boot camp.

Records from the ship show that he was suffering from what in today's terms would be called post traumatic stress disorder, Robert Spaly said.

“They had a different term for it back then. Shell-shocked was one. They sent him to Battle Creek, where they had a pretty good sized rehabilitation program. My father passed it off as his ears. They had been worked over and they sent him over there to allow him to recoup.”

The scars from the war were still fresh when he moved from his adopted hometown of Flint to California to finish his undergraduate degree.

“We lived right at the end of the military airport in San Diego, and when the jets began to come in for the Korean war, they came in they whistled apparently just like incoming artillery did in World War II,” Robert said.

“The first time that happened we were eating Sunday dinner and you could hear this faint whhhhhh whistle in the background, and my dad just hit the deck, hands over his head and I thought ‘holy moly what’s going on.’ I was just six years old.”

Spaly relied on the GI Bill, which paid tuition for returning soldiers, to continue his education at the University of Michigan. His small family moved to Willow Run in the 1950s so that he could attend the University of Michigan. Robert said he remembered having to wake up at 2 a.m. every day in the winter as a nine-year-old to feed the coal-burning potbellied stove that heated the family’s small house.

“He was a very military guy, and everything he did raising us when we were young was very military,” Robert Spaly said. “We had to have our bed made and stiff every morning. When you put the quarter on it, it had to bounce.”

In the late 1960s, the Vietnam War threatened to draft another Spaly. Robert said he turned to his father for advice when he realized he would likely be called into service.

“I asked him, ‘If I were to skip this conflict how would you feel?’” Robert Spaly said.

“He said, ‘Well, you know what, war is hell. And there’s no reason you have to get involved in that.'”

Oscar Spaly told his son to avoid being drafted either by enlisting and choosing his destination or joining the reserves, and Robert eventually took the latter path. Even after that conversation, many of Spaly’s stories from the war stayed untold until the late 1990s when he began to talk about what it had been like.

“It was scary the way he described it,” Robert Spaly said. “The war was a brutal thing… If I had known what he went through I would have had a lot different picture of him and I probably would have treated him differently too. But you don’t find these things out until later on.”

One of the things that likely helped Spaly begin to open up about his time in the war was a family vacation to Europe in the mid-1980s. The trip, to explore the family’s roots, took Oscar and his children through some of the battlefields and cities he had lived and fought in 40 years prior.

“It was interesting going through some of the towns he had been through in the war,” Doug Spaly said. “I think it was nice for him to see that the towns had been rebuilt and you didn’t see too many signs of the war. He kept saying that when he had been there everything was bombed out. Just a wreck.”

Although Spaly will not be able to tell his children any more war stories, they will forever be able to hear him at Camp Shelby, telling their mother that “You musn’t worry, dear. I feel fine. Spiritually, morally and certainly physically.”

“The country is beautiful and the air here is like tonic for my body,” he continues, the sound crackling from years of scratches and rough handling. “… Remember, sweetheart, keep your chin up.”

Ben Freed is a general assignments reporter for The Ann Arbor News. Email him at benfreed@mlive.com and follow him on twitter at @BFreedinA2. He also answers the phone at 734-623-2528.